Back to the dinner table

No sooner is Partus done than we’re up in Newcastle, in residence at Northern Stage.

We’re here to work on two shows – one new, one re-staging.

Photo: Martin Fuller

We’re reworking Presumption, returning to the original cast. Rachael, Chris and I made Presumption back in 2006, the two of them performing the couple Tom and Beth, and it ran for a week in the Crucible Studio in Sheffield. The following year, Rachael redirected the show with Lucy in her role, and the piece went on tour in the UK and internationally, becoming our most performed show at the time.

Back in October 2015, we remounted the touring version of Presumption, with Lucy Ellinson and Chris, in Sheffield, to mark our 20th Anniversary. [Here’s what I wrote about that atthe time.] At the time Chris and Lucy hadn’t performed the show for six and a half years. Rachael hasn’t performed it for ten.

There’s a section in the show where things ‘go wrong’ and the performers/characters have a couple of brief, semi-improvised exchanges about what’s gone wrong and what should have happened. Sometimes in rehearsal I can’t tell if they’re discussing, rehearsing or performing. And occasionally they can’t. “Hang on, is this the show now?”

On Friday last week we did a first ‘run’ on the set, using all the furniture and props, Rachael almost caught up with Chris in terms of knowing the text. Both of them figuring out how this works again/now. And – *obvious klaxon* – it’s different. Rachael plays Beth differently. She hasn’t performed the show as much as Lucy – and Lucy “made it her own” – but Rachael co-wrote it and performed the first run, then re-directed it. She knows this stuff. It doesn’t feel new, or weird, but different. Different to how she played it 10 years ago, and different to Lucy. And of course [*klaxon*], Chris plays Tom differently opposite Rachael. They say the same things, but it’s a slightly different relationship. There’s a different tone. We like it.

Digression. We know anecdotally that watching Presumption has played a part in at least three break-ups, two decisions to make another go of it, and apparently at least one marriage proposal. One couple also asked if they could read out the closing speech as part of their wedding service.

People naturally watch the show through the prism of their own relationships. Those of us who made it probably have different views on what’s going on in between the two characters. After a performance at Leeds Metropolitan Studio Theatre in 2007, I spoke to a friend who had seen the show that night, and 18 months earlier in Sheffield.

  “You’ve changed the ending,” she said, “it’s much more optimistic now.”

  “We haven’t,” I said, “it’s exactly the same.”

  “Really?” she asked, genuinely surprised.

She was with another friend, who explained: “It’s the same ending. What’s different is you. You’re in a very different relationship now. You’re more optimistic.”

It felt like a moment of truth. And I’ve told that story several times over the years.

But on Friday afternoon, it occurred to me, that we *had* changed the ending. Not the ending, specifically, the whole thing. We had changed one of the people in the relationship, so the whole thing might have felt different enough to have contributed to her feeling that we’d actually rewritten the end.

Or maybe she was just happier.

But whether you’ve seen it before or not, we’d love you to come along and see what you think. It’s on at Northern Stage this week.

Alongside that, we’re at very early stages of working on a new show. At the moment it’s called Global Teatime, and we’re exploring ideas about timezones, mealtimes, food distribution and water security. There’s not much more I can say about at the moment, other than that we’re at the exciting/scary point in a process where it could turn in to anything. We’ll be sharing some of our findings here at Northern Stage on Wednesday February 10^th, and I’ll be using some of them as the basis for a workshop the day afterwards.

Notes On A Revival

Here's the Programme Note from Presumption in Sheffield last week, plus some brand new production shots by Technical Manager and Photographer Martin Fuller:

It’s not, technically, a revival. We never took Presumption out of repertoire. It’s always been available for touring. It’s just that we haven’t performed it, we realised in rehearsal last week, for six years.

Lucy says that usually, when you stop doing a show after a long run, it’s like taking a piece of furniture out of your living room. You miss it at first, but gradually the indentations in the carpet fade. With Presumption, she says, the indentations have never completely gone.

We made Presumption in early 2006, and presented it for a week here in the Crucible Studio, performed by Rachael and Chris. The following year, Rachael redirected the show with Lucy in her role, and the piece went on tour in the UK, and to the Intercity Festival in Florence, before a week at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of the British Council Showcase in August 2007. This in turn led more international bookings, and over the next 18 months Presumption became our most performed show with gigs in Brussels, Barcelona, Clonmell, Moscow, Yerevan, Mannheim and Lisbon, before returning for runs in London and Leicester.

A show grows and matures over a tour like that, so it’s a real pleasure to bring the show back to Sheffield in the version that toured so extensively.

Since we made Presumption, we’ve all made many other shows, as Third Angel and outside of it. We’ve been busier than ever with UK and international touring (most noticeably with What I Heard About the World).

When we gathered in the Lyceum rehearsal room last week, we just had a go at it. Chris and Lucy found that a great deal of the show was still in there, in their heads. A quick re-read of the text and a second run through and we had the whole thing back surprisingly quickly.

Coming back to it after all this time, we were surprised how recent, how familiar, it still feels. We’ve carried on with our lives, of course, and all our family lives are different to when we made the show, and the world is very different, in some ways, to when we were touring it. But we’ve resisted the temptation to ‘update’ the show, or rather, the references it makes to the world beyond its walls. The conversation they’re having remains current.

Finally, this not-revival of Presumption is being staged as one of the events to mark Third Angel’s 20th Anniversary as a company. That achievement would not have been possible without the support of many people – especially you, our Sheffield audience. We are constantly grateful for your interest in the work, and the conversations we get to have with you about it. Thank you.

Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton, October 2015

                                                             

Third Angel presents

PRESUMPTION

Crucible Studio Theatre,

Sheffield

6 - 10 October 2015

Devised & Created by the Company

Lucy Ellinson           Performer

Martin Fuller           Technical Manager & Relight

James Harrison      Lighting Designer

Alexander Kelly      Designer / Director / Writer

David Mitchell         Composer / Sound Designer

Chris Thorpe            Performer / Writer

Rachael Walton      Director / Designer / Writer

Hilary Foster            General Manager    

Liz Johnson              Admin & Production Trainee

                                   

With Special Thanks to:

Helen Fagelman; Kati Hind, Phil Baines, all of the tech team, and indeed all of the staff, at Sheffield Theatres.

www.thirdangel.co.uk

Twitter: @thirdangeluk

facebook.com/thirdangeluk

Third Angel is a Resident Company at Sheffield Theatres.

Supported using public money from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Presumption Rehearsals 2015

Here are shots by Martin Fuller of Lucy Ellinson and Chris Thorpe in rehearsal for Presumption, in the Lyceum Rehearsal Room last week. Some performances are already sold out, so please do book if you're planning to see the show.

On Editing, Paradise and Presumption

"In an edit suite at the Northern Media School, Sheffield, there are two pieces of paper stuck on the wall. On one of them is written the phrase:

IF IN DOUBT, LEAVE IT OUT.

And on another:

IF YOU CAN’T WIN, LEAVE IT IN.

This is 1994, and I am studying film and video editing as part of my post-graduate course in Film and TV production. I had applied to direct, but all of the directing places were full, and although I had a lot of experience of working with actors, I didn’t have much filming experience, and so they offered me a place as an editor. I was a bit pissed off about their reasoning at the time, but retrospectively, I’m really pleased that I got to train as an editor."

I have a new article in the new edition of Contemporary Theatre Review. It is happily nestled in the backpages section alongside work by Hannah Silva and Maddy Costa (to name but two). And, it's free to download. You can read it here.

I was invited to reflect on the way Third Angel edit our work during the devising process, so I was making notes towards that idea during the making of The Paradise Project in November last year. I was also thinking about how one realisation can allow lots of pending decisions to fall into place, and so wanted to write about Presumption, too. And inevitably, when it comes to editing, I wanted to write about being taught film editing by Derek Ingliss at the Northern Media School.

Thanks to Carl Lavery and Caridad Svich for commissioning the piece.

Working Drawings

If you've seen What I Heard About The World, you'll have seen me, or Jorge and me (depending on which version you saw) draw a picture of a donkey, and then turn it into a zebra.

I/we do this live each night. We know we have to modify the drawing of the donkey to become a zebra, because that's what they do at Gaza Zoo, so we draw the donkey from scratch as well. Other drawings in the show are redrawn afresh in advance of each performance (the paper plane) or are reused each night (a lifesize flat daddy and a set of haircuts). But it feels right to draw the donkey live.

This connects to the Story Map performance that is part of the whole What I Heard About The World project, in which we draw icons for all of the stories we gather throughout the piece. Drawing the donkey is much easier of course, as I know what I'm going to draw, and I've now had a lot of practice.

During the run in Sheffield we were invited to contribute some work to the exhibition Working Drawings, which has just opened at the Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery.  Pam Bowman, the curator, was interested in us representing how we use drawing in the work, but also as part of the process for projects that don't necessarily feature drawing by the time they meet an audience.

In the end we're showing a selection of finished work and documentation. We were asked, naturally, to provide an artist's statement about the work. I asked how long it should be. Pam said, "As long as it needs to be - you know, there's more context needed for your work. I mean, why do you draw live in front of an audience?"

This is something that has come up in discussion with a few audience members, so I've been thinking about it this last week or so.  I'm not sure our artist's statement fully answers that question, but it certainly explores our use of drawing. Here it is.

Third Angel

Drawing Projects

Third Angel is an internationally-touring theatre company based in Sheffield. We make work that connects the territories of theatre, live art, film & video, photography, installation and digital media.

The work is devised by the artists working on each project, led by Artistic Directors Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton. The devising process is one of discovering and developing the form and content of the work, and drawing is one of the tools we naturally use.

Drawing is, unsurprisingly, used to develop early ideas, work things out, and to share thoughts: how the space might work, what a performer relationship might look like, how something might be constructed. But it is also used as part of the aesthetic and action of some projects. We’d rather use a hand drawn straight line than a ruled one. We would (usually) rather use a traced map or diagram than a photocopied one. We would (usually) rather use handwriting than projected type. If an image or text needs to be big, we would (often) rather draw it small and blow it up – to see the imperfections that make the line unique.

And drawing is one of the tasks we have been found ourselves returning to in a number of our live performance projects, something to do in front of the audience, rather than something to be prepared earlier. The work is full of narrative, character, fiction, mixed in with autobiography and factual research. The mode of presentation utilises text – character dialogue, personal narrative and explanation – along with the performance of tasks. Real actions are part of the performance: carrying all of the furniture required on from the wings; balancing your own weight against your fellow performer’s through a pulley system, whilst creating a perfect, three metre circle of talcum powder on the floor.

Sometimes this live drawing is of diagrams and maps. Sometimes it is illustration. Often it has a restriction placed on it – a simple time limit, or the fact that it has to be done with eyes closed. Restrictions that might seem to say, Don’t worry, of course the drawing won’t be very good in these conditions, when of course, we include the drawing, and the restrictions, because in fact we believe the opposite.

For Working Drawings we are showing a number of pieces:

Mixtape: Songmap (2010)

Video piece / documentation of live performance. 7 mins.

Music: The First Big Weekend by Arab Strap.

Performance devised and performed by Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton.

Filmmaker: Christopher Hall.

The brief, for Unlimited Theatre’s Mixtape project, was to create stage action to accompany a favourite song. We didn’t want to tell a different story to the one in a chosen song, and we didn’t want to act it out. We talked about cataloguing and mapping. Originally the drawing was going to be done much bigger, on a wall, by both of us. But actually our presence, along with the view of our backs, was not helpful. We’d used the drawing table for writing ‘chapter titles’ in the show The Lad Lit Project (2005), but the devising process for that piece had involved a lot more drawing. So we changed the scale of the Songmap drawing and found we had this.

Pleasant Land – Lightbox maps (2003)

Hand drawn maps with text and photographic images.

Commissioned by Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre and Shooting Live Artists.

www.pleasantland.org

It began with the Census. There wasn't a 'Scottish', 'Welsh' or 'English' box to tick. Only 'British' or 'Irish'. People in and from Scotland and Wales wanted their own boxes. We noticed that Scottish and Welsh friends referred to themselves as, surprise, Scottish and Welsh.

Between April 2003 and March 2004 we travelled around England, meeting people, asking them about their own Englands and asking what Englishness is these days. Every month we sent digital postcards from our travels. In October 2003 Leeds Met University Gallery hosted a Gallery installation and performance, responding to this travelling research and the responses to Pleasant Land Online.

We’d been keeping diaries and taking photographs. We had planned our routes, but then been distracted and diverted. Or just got lost. In trying to work out, retrospectively, exactly where we had been, we began tracing our route from the road atlas. We became infatuated with these new maps that charted a very selective version of England – the England we had travelled through. It felt important that the lines of the map should remain hand-drawn, and the text be in handwriting, to recognise the personal, partial, nature of the record.

We asked people if they knew the difference between England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Often, they didn't. We asked ourselves what our England was, what we liked about our country, what we didn't? We wondered if other people would recognise Our England, or we, theirs.

Presumption (2006)

In association with Sheffield Theatres.

Performers: Lucy Ellinson & Chris Thorpe

Directors & Designers: Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton.

Performance photographs by Mark Cohen.

A bare stage. Bare, that is, except for the white lines marking out the (sometimes multiple) placements of a domestic environment. Furniture. Objects. Stuff. A table, six chairs. Precariously carried, precisely placed. Begin the scene, post-dinner party. Guest have gone. Stop. More furniture required.

Presumption is a show about love – love after the initial thrill of passion has gone. Everyday, what shall we have for dinner, love. The performers attempt to enact scenes from the lives of a couple, but continually come up against the obstacle of missing furniture or set, which they have to carry on from the wings. The positions that the furniture will occupy is marked out on to the floor in (hand drawn) white chalk paint. Somewhere in between a (1:1 scale) floor plan and crime scene.

Parts For Machines That Do Things (2008)

A co-production with Sheffield Theatres.

Devised by Alexander Kelly, Jeremy Killick, Gillian Lees & Chris Thorpe.

A show about aircrash investigation, about cause and effect. The performers piece together the narrative through extracts of text – monologue and dialogue – whilst also constructing, on camera, model-kit passenger airplanes.

The three projection screens were treated as a triptych, frames in which images were constructed as if they were drawings – sometimes explanatory diagrams, sometimes more abstract imagery.

What I Heard About The World – Story Map (2010)

A collaboration with mala voadora, originally presented with Forest Fringe.

Devised & Performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly & Chris Thorpe.

Photographs by Isa Maubach.

A durational research performance that gathers, and re-tells, stories from the audience. True stories of fakes, replicas, stand-ins and substitutes. The world is mapped out, alphabetically, using post-it notes over the course of 12 hours. We attempt to collect a story for each country from the audience, or from our own memories. Each story is then labelled with a two word title, and illustrated with a hand-drawn icon to stand on the map.

What I Heard About The World (2010)

A co-production with mala voadora, Sheffield Theatres and Teatro Maria Matos, in association with PAZZ Festival and Worldmapper.org.

Devised & Performed by Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly & Chris Thorpe,

in collaboration with José Capela & Rachael Walton.

Rehearsal photographs by Clive Egginton.

Show photographs by Craig Fleming.

Plane photograph by Alexander Kelly.

A theatre performance intertwining stories gathered from the Research Table durational performance and other sources. The live drawing technology from Songmap was in the rehearsal process for some time, particularly to represent the specificity, subjectivity and fallibility of maps. As we moved away from maps to focus on the stories we had gathered, the drawing remained, but as physical objects – as stand-ins – for real things, with one drawing done live to tell the story of donkeys in Gaza zoo being painted to look like zebras.

The ‘prepared’ drawings play with the scale of representation: a life-size ‘flat daddy’ is blown up from a small illustration; life-size haircuts are drawn actual size; a hijacked passenger airplane is drawn in miniature 3D.

**

www.thirdangel.co.uk

Third Angel is Regularly Funded by Arts Council England, Yorkshire. All of the projects presented here were also supported by funds from the National Lottery via Arts Council England.

Last Chance To See?

Well, for a while at least...  Next week Presumption is on at Leicester's fantastic new CURVE venue, with a post-show discussion on Wednesday.  This is the show's last scheduled outing for a while.  There will hopefully be some international work with it next year, but this could be the last showing in the UK.  It's our most performed show to date, following the three week run in London just before Christmas.  That run produced a real range of reviews, from raves to stinkers, which I liked.  But my favourite review was on Culture Wars, headlined 'A warm bath, run by another'.

Also on its possible final outing is 9 Billion Miles From Home, which we're taking to the greenroom in Manchester on Friday evening.  It's nice, as ever, to be going back to the greenroom, who we've been working with for 12 years now, for this possibly-last performance, as we know we'll be well looked after.  If you're coming down, there's a Seed Fund project, "Moi..?" by Gemma Neep at 7pm, which is free if you've got a ticket for us - which is a really nice initiative that the greenroom are running.  The 'durational ritual' part of our performance will begin at 7.30pm, with show time officially at 8pm, plus an after-show discussion.

These projects have both been around for a few years now, in their different guises, so it won't be an entirely emotion-free week, putting them [temporarily] away.

"it felt like we knew all of those people ourselves"

Our friend, and now fairly long term supporter of the work, Annabel Turpin, sent me a link to a blog post she wrote about presenting Presumption at ARC in Stockton last month, and coming down to see Class of '76 in Leeds.  It's one of the nicest things I've ever read about our work.

It won't be a surprise that I'm going to link to it, here.

How It Works

Technology film still 

by Christopher Hall

Full details of Third angel events for the first few months of 2009 are up on the main site now.  Class of '76, Presumption and 9 Billion Miles From Home are all out on the road in Sheffield, Scarborough, Leeds, Glasgow and Stockton.

We're kicking off with a screening of new short films by Third Angel and Christopher Hall & myself, at the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield on 30 January.  We'll be showing brand new and very recent stuff, none of which will have been shown (publicly at least) in Sheffield before.  

One of the new pieces is called Technology, which is inspired by a section from Parts For Machines That Do Things [co-produced with Sheffield Theatres this time last year].  The text for this is a long structured improvisation - me attempting to explain all of the technology I encounter in a single day - that Chris will be editing down to about 10 minutes.  Apparently my attempt to explain why clocks "move slower" as they approach the speed of light is an [unintentional] comedy highlight.  We'll see.

The Home Straight

After a year of touring that has taken us to Italy, Portugal, Germany, Russia, England, Eire, Spain, Armenia and Belgium, it's great to be finishing the year with three weeks of performances in the UK.

Presumption opens tomorrow for a three week run at Southwark Playhouse.  There's a nice preview on Lyn Gardner's blog on the Guardian website:

It's a wonderful example of a show in which form and content are perfectly matched, as it dissects the relationship of a thirtysomething couple who are long past that time when they can't keep their hands off each other and have built a life of shared memories and shared furniture.

They have an 'airline style' pricing system at Southwark, so if you're coming along it's worth booking in advance as you're more likely to get a cheaper ticket...

Postcards from the Road - Yerevan

We took Presumption to High Fest in Armenia for two nights earlier this month.  Perhaps the trickiest get in we've had, but great support and hard work from the theatre crew, the festival staff and the touring team meant we were ready (just) on time and had two great shows.

Oh, and it was Lucy & Chris' 50th performance of the show together.  Congratulations all round...

Green room chess.

All new set.

The view from the table.

Autumn Schedule

Lucy Ellinson in Presumption

Photo by Mark Cohen

Our autumn programme is pretty much confirmed, with the possible addition of a trip to High Fest in Armenia next month.  The Lad Lit Project, 9 Billion Miles From Home and Presumption are all out on the road, and full the details are on the Third Angel home page.

No doubt these projects will all get more discussion on this blog individually as they loom closer.  However, I wanted to give a special mention to Presumption at Southwark Playhouse.  We're delighted to be doing a three week run there (17 November - 6 December) at the behest of our friend Ellie Jones.  It looks like a great season lined up there, including Ellie's own production of How To Disappear And Never Be Found and Unlimited Theatre's The Ethics of Progress (co-written by Chris Thorpe who, of course, performs and co-wrote Presumption), followed by a world premiere of the stage version of Philip Pullman's The Scarecrow and His Servant.  

It's a really exciting season to be a part of, but that's not the reason for mentioning it now.  The reason is Southwark Playhouse's 'airline ticket' style booking system, which basically means the earlier you book, the more likely you are to get a cheaper ticket.  So book now, and you can see the show for £8.  Tell your friends!

Postcards from the Road - Barcelona

The view from upstage.

Presumption has just got back from the Fast Forward weekend at Barcelona Festival Grec.  The biggest space we've played, and our biggest audiences, for this show.  An amazing, but slightly alarming, outdoor courtyard space. However, despite our reservations about sightlines, sound levels and traffic noise, it worked brilliantly, thanks in no small part to some very hard work and late nights (lights had to be focused and plotted when it was dark, of course, so the get in finished at 5.30am) by the touring team of Lucy, Chris and Martin, and the Festival crew.  

The view from 4am.

It was a great mix of companies and work to be part of, and audience and venue feedback was great, so thanks to everyone who came to see the work and who chatted to us or emailed afterwards.

Alex

Presumption at The Drum

A couple of nice mentions from Lyn Gardner in The Guardian in advance of our 5 nights in Plymouth this week - in The Guide and on her blog. 

The show opens tomorrow night (Tuesday 17th) and you can get tickets here. We're doing a post-show discussion on Thursday night.

I know this is a rather brief post, but I *am* on holiday.

Alex